Minou Drouet... the French Child Author Whose Story Has Shaken the World

Rarely does a great newspaper or magazine appear these days without something new and curious in it about the French child Minou Drouet, who has never ceased to be the preoccupation of the literary circles and the first subject of their debate!

The uproar around Minou Drouet began when the French publisher Julliard brought out a collection of her poems. The papers passed the news along, and the public was not long in splitting into two camps: the first cheering the prodigy child and calling her “the wonder of the century,” and the second saying: there is a monstrous deception here, and someone must surely be prompting her to these writings — most probably her adoptive mother, who for four years now has been giving her instruction and urging her on to reading and to ranging widely in it. And here it asks: is it enough to push the little ones down the road of learning and letters to make of them, at a very early age, scholars and men of letters?

As the days passed, the breach widened between the two parties, the one for her and the one against her — which moved the child Minou to present herself, alone, at the headquarters of the society of writers, authors, publishers, and musicians, after she had requested by letter the appointment of a time for a writer's examination.

The examining committee and jury convened, and its president declared to the newspaper “Paris-Presse” that it was the first time that he and his committee had examined a child eight years of age.

The little girl sat down without agitation, and she was asked to write on one of the following four subjects:

1 — I am only eight years old. 2 — You are my enemy, O examination.
3 — The blank page that awaits me. 4 — The sky of Paris.

... And Minou handed in her paper after twenty minutes! The president of the society declared that she astonished them all, until it seemed to them that some other person must be sitting at the writing paper, and that one cannot believe this little girl capable of giving work of so high an order!!

Upon the announcement of the results the uproar around Minou Drouet broke out anew: the papers scrambled to gather her news and publish her pictures — and, more important than all this, her poems and her letters; and some named her “the Mozart of poetry.” Whoever reads her verse cannot miss that fresh, childlike breath, as though it were a gift from heaven!

What does it matter to us that Minou Drouet should be a foundling girl, descended from no known stock? What does it matter to us that some make light of her colored thoughts, and others doubt her artistic imagination...
Enough for us that she is a beneficent impetus to letters and poetry — a world of prospects that will add to our hoped-for tomorrow a blessed handful of joy...

We pass on to our readers below some passages of her verse never before translated into Arabic:

How many nights I have sat watching the rabbits play,
while the moon spreads over the meadow its blue shadows,
beneath the trunk of a dead oak, reflecting the map
of night upon the face of the sky,
... the long hours pass, and I lie stretched
on the grass,
gazing at the rabbits, in their white silken wool,
darting off headlong...
their dancing noses going before them...
like the mumbling of an old woman at prayer!!

... Here is the raging sea, like a huge-bodied cat
rolling in the foam, coming toward me;
so I open the window to receive it,
and feel my cheek grow wet with delight!

I am mad with joy. I have received a book!
It is a book — the one thing that grants
complete happiness,
and happiness is rarely complete!
It is joy ringing in the eyes, in the fingers,
in the heart and in the mind,
for when we open it, life unfolds before us:
as though we had opened a goldfinch's cage, or a garden gate
at night!